Tag Archives: Anthologies

CSFG members have been busy as usual – here’s the latest news. Congratulations in particular to everyone who picked up various awards and gongs! And here’s to a bountiful and successful writing year in 2016!

Non-fiction

Chris Large recently interviewed Ann Leckie for Aurealis #86 (the current issue). He also spoke with Trudi Canavan about the release of her new novel Angel of Storms. That interview will appear early in 2016 when Aurealis goes global.

Gillian Polack study of the past decade or so will be going to press sometime in 2016. History and Fiction: Writers, their Research, Worlds and Stories. Several CSFG writers were interviewed in the early stages of this and are quoted.

Awards and Honours

Alan Baxter is going to be the Special Guest at Conflux 12 in October 2016.

Donna Maree Hanson is about to commence a PHD in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra; her topic will be Feminism in Popular Romance.

Nalini Haynes recently graduated with an Associate Degree in Professional Writing and Editing. Her grades were sufficiently high to attract an invitation to join the Golden Key International Honours Society.

Chris Large’s story “Future Me, Future Her” was highly recommended by the SciFi Film Festival and won a Dimension6 encouragement award at the ceremony.

Canberra-based author-illustrator Shane W. Smith, who spoke at a recent CSFG meeting about writing and producing comics, is seeking contributions for his upcoming anthology All the King’s Men. Shane is looking for original short stories and comic scripts set in the galaxy-spanning science fiction universe of his previous graphic novels: The Lesser Evil, Peaceful Tomorrows and The Game. Prospective contributors are asked to familiarise themselves with the background of the setting (or to read the graphic novels!) so they can pitch outlines for either an original story or one of a number of concepts sketched out by Shane.

The theme of the anthology is: “sometimes it’s impossible to mend what has been broken.”

Note that this is a paid writing gig – Shane has a grant to produce the anthology from artsACT and is offering at least 4c a word for prose stories.

For more information on All the King’s Men, or to contact Shane to discuss your ideas, check out the submission guidelines. Submissions close on 31 March 2016.

Ian McHugh’s story “Uncle Bob’s Crocodile” is out in this month’s edition of Urban Fantasy magazine (available now for subscribers and it’ll be archived online for everyone else later in the month).

Ian wanted to mention that he credits this story to a discussion with fellow CSFG’er David Dufty in a 24-hour story challenge workshop a couple of years ago. Proof positive that CSFG membership conveys rich rewards and lasting fame!

Alan Baxter has two stories coming out soon, both in anthologies from Cohesion Press:

The Never Never Land will be an anthology of Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror storiesedited by Mitchell Akhurst, Phillip Berrie and Ian McHugh. It will be published in April 2015 as both a trade paperback and in e-book formats.

What We’re Looking For

CSFG anthologies have been elsewhere and encountered the other, we’ve met the outcast and seen behind the mask and what happens next. Now we want to bring the stories back here, in our new anthology with the working title of The Never Never Land.

For The Never Never Land, we’re looking for Australian stories, whatever that may mean to you, or stories that are inspired by this country.

If you send us Peter Pan stories, you’re probably missing the point.

Think On the Beach, Mad Max, Two Hands and Tomorrow, When the War Began. Think Terry Dowling’s Rynosseros and Wormwood stories, Sean Williams’s Books of the Change, Patricia Wrightson’s The Nargun and the Stars and the stories in Gillian Polack’s Baggage anthology. Or step outside and look around you, and think something completely different. We want to capture the diversity of what an “Australian + speculative” story can mean.

Submissions will open from 1 June to 31 August 2014. Stories submitted outside this period will be discarded unread.

A positive review of Next at Adventures of a Bookonaut: “Now despite what may appear to be a rather open theme this collection hangs together very well. I doffs me hat to the editors for their selections and the collation of the work. There’s some well known writers with absolutely cracking work and some new faces with a good tale to tell.”